Alain Bosquet

by Alain Bosquet

Alain Bosquet

Alain Bosquet (1919-1998) was born in Odessa in 1919 but spent his childhood in Belgium. He was still a student when the Germans invaded the country in 1940. Later he was in the Belgian and French Armies. In 1942 he came to America and became an American citizen. Bosquet was assistant editor of the first Gaullist paper in America, The Voice of France, and was co-founder of the magazine Hemispheres. He passed away in 1998.

“A poem,” according to Alain Bosquet, “is an exacting friend.” Poet, literary editor of Le Monde, and a central fact of French intellectual life, Bosquet (1919-1998) is himself exacting. He demands a “simple, direct, ambitious poetry” and seeks to invent “new rapports between man and the universe, man and the void, man and himself.” Selected by Bosquet, the poems in No Matter No Fact are translated by Samuel Beckett, Edouard Roditi, and the author himself.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”